if you unmerge zlib your portage will be completely broke and you wont be able to merge ANYTHING.... he's got zip problems so im saying his zlib is possibly broken also. mines using a minizip useflag for something or other, he should probably also remerge tar...

Right, and I had similar issue with freshly installed system, I had to build binpkg of app-arch/xz-utils on another host to overcome this. I still don't know what caused this, I was installing a new box while using stable stage3 and same time switching over to ~arch. Once everything was ~arch xz-utils built and ran fine._________________Please learn how to denote units correctly!